Why do you think I don’t want what I’d ordered?

Double Vision with Charlie Adley

With Blue Bag sitting snug on Bennett’s back seat, I jump into my car and drive off. It’s 7.10am on Saturday. Yahoo! That time of year again, when the World visits Galway and I feel a strong desire to leave.

I do recall though that last year’s trip was bathed in sunshine. I think I was off waxing all lyrical and poetic about the gold and the green of the Irish Summer landscape.

This year it’s a proper Irish Summer landscape: you can’t see it. Impossible to tell if it’s a downpour, low cloud or that old fave: a soft day, the water is all around. If the Eskimos can have their words for snow, the Irish should have 40 shades of delay for their windscreen wipers.

South, through the tunnel through the clouds, into Cork and then the capital of the rebel county, where you have to do that mad going east to go west Ring Road thing. Although I do get lost in the Burren, for some reason forever sucked back to Miltown Malbay, I’ve a strong sense of direction muscle.

So as that cries “No! You are going the wrong way, you fool!” from my substantial gut, I do as advised by Cork City’s planners, and after a mind-stretching maze of filters and bewildering junctions that makes Galway look mildly sensible, I make it to the Guru’s house.

The rain is lashing and just as I hoped, my friend has no plans. We need go nowhere, do nothing, so we will talk. We met in 1969, becoming firm friends in the early 1980s. Since then strands geographic, spiritual and emotional have intertwined our lives. We need not say much to find out a lot of each other, yet sometimes one will rant for hours.

On this trip, as the cloud touched the ground, the wind whipping up just enough to light a fire, we played cards for a day and a half, pausing between random hands to look round the Guru’s garden. He is a man who knows how to work with the land and gradually, bewitchingly, his patch is looking splendid.

First though we decide to make up the sofa bed. There, now that pulls out there and oh – lift – there, that’s it. Now this cushion here, and that one there, great.

The bed is out, secure and two of the three cushions are on it. There only remains the wedge cushion that runs along the top, where the pillows go.

There can only be so many different combinations of how that cushion might fit across the sofa bed, but I think it’s safe to say that over the next 20 minutes we tried each of them seven times, as we gradually collapsed with laughter.

No idea where it started. A glimpse in the eye maybe, acknowledging that this really should be very a very simple task, yet now there was the potential for absurdism and humour.